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Family Matters.

by Andy Friday, August 12, 2011

Family Matters

Recently I had the good pleasure of sitting down and having an incredible conversation with one of Cabin Bluff’s long-term, loyal guests, Mr. Jack Goldfrank. I was interested in speaking with Jack for many reasons. From the fact that he has been visiting Cabin Bluff regularly for over 20 years to the fact that his visits now include his family and extended family, he was a person who was bound to have a very unique perspective on the experience that Cabin Bluff represents.

My instincts were correct. Jack is not only a staunch advocate for the Cabin Bluff experience but he’s an extraordinary family man who has found a very unique way to bring his family together.

Jack’s first visit to CB was way back in 1981, when he was invited to make a presentation to a Board of Directors Meeting. That business connection and repeat visits continued through the early nineties. Along about 1995, Jack came up with an idea. What if he created an event to bring his family to Cabin Bluff to which Jack’s wife promptly replied, “We don’t like any of that kind of activity.” Yet Jack persevered with those words all to common to husbands everywhere - trust me.

Let’s backup a bit, Jack was raised in the New York City area and for all he can remember there wasn’t a lot of quail hunting or fishing in his boyhood neighborhood. Fact is he’d never fired a gun until he fired at a clay at CB. Although Jack and his wife have spent the last 16 years in the South, the sporting pursuits offered by Cabin Bluff just didn’t make their way into their personal lifestyle.

But Jack saw more than the myriad activities at Cabin Bluff. He saw the opportunity to create an “event that makes them all want to be together,” not the obligatory events like Thanksgiving where the family has to be together, but an event that sounded like so much fun that it would be irresistible to miss. All set in the backdrop of this extremely beautiful place where everyone could do what they wanted and experience new things.

Jack nailed it.

The event was a huge success, exactly as anticipated and yet so much more. As Jack says, the staff has become a part of his family. His children have become friends with some of the children of employees, even to the point of his granddaughters remember getting an extraordinary personal tour to see some of the Bluff’s reptilian residents first hand by the daughter of one of the staff members.

The impact on his family has been incredible. His grandchildren can’t wait to go and now his entourage has grown to include close friends who have become so enamored with the Goldfrank’s Bluff stories that they wanted to be a part of it as well.

As Jack says, “When we leave, its always been with regret”. The Bluff has truly become a part of Jack’s family as well.

Perhaps there is nothing more powerful than those positive family memories that span generations. Philosophers have said that those memories that become multi-generation traditions are analogous to immortality because through them we never die. The memories created with your parents or grandparents of that first fishing trip, that first sporting clay, that first putt or that first time peeling a fresh shrimp live on. They become a part of your family’s DNA so powerful that you want to then pass them along to your own children with the hope that they in turn will pass it along to theirs.

Cabin Bluff is indeed an extraordinary place, not simply because of the staff, cabins and the amenities but because of the memories that it has inspired for generations.